Principal Data Engineer

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Data Engineer based in India.** This is a unique opportunity to build a modern data platform from the ground up and define the foundation for a rapidly evolving technology ecosystem. As a Principal Data Engineer, you will architect scalable data solutions that support analytics, AI-driven products, and operational decision-making. You will lead the transition from fragmented data workflows to a governed, reliable, and self-service data infrastructure. The role combines deep technical expertise with strategic influence, working closely with engineering, product, machine learning, and business teams. You will shape how data is collected, transformed, governed, and consumed across the organization while solving complex challenges involving multimodal data, automation, and large-scale systems. This position is ideal for a senior data leader who enjoys creating foundational platforms and driving long-term technical impact. ### Accountabilities: - Architect and build a greenfield, multi-layer data platform that separates analytical workloads from production systems and enables scalable data consumption. - Design and implement a modern data warehouse architecture across raw, refined, and serving layers to support business intelligence, analytics, and AI use cases. - Develop a governed self-service data access framework that enables internal teams to securely access reliable and consistent data. - Establish semantic and metrics layers that define business metrics centrally, ensuring consistency across dashboards, products, and analytical workflows. - Own data quality, reliability, and governance standards by implementing monitoring, validation, lineage, and observability practices. - Design tenant isolation strategies, access controls, cost attribution models, and scalable architectures to support future growth. - Partner with integration and backend teams to define data contracts, schema validation processes, and ingestion standards. - Build and optimize data pipelines supporting batch processing, streaming ingestion, workflow automation, and high-volume data workloads. - Create and maintain data catalogs and lineage solutions to improve data discoverability, ownership, and traceability. - Connect structured operational data with unstructured sources such as images and video, enabling advanced analytics and machine learning workflows. - Collaborate with product, engineering, ML, customer success, and leadership teams to establish data as a reliable internal product. - Provide technical leadership and influence architectural decisions while operating as a senior individual contributor. ## Requirements - 10+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 3 years focused on architecting data platforms for analytics, data products, or AI-driven solutions. - Proven experience building data warehouses from the ground up and leading transitions from transactional systems to analytical platforms. - Deep expertise in designing scalable multi-layer data architectures and reusable data transformation frameworks. - Advanced SQL skills with hands-on experience using dbt, ELT methodologies, and data orchestration tools. - Strong experience with large-scale data processing, distributed systems, batch pipelines, and real-time streaming architectures. - Production experience with major cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP, including infrastructure automation and CI/CD practices. - Experience designing data models, transformation layers, serving layers, and optimized datasets for business consumption. - Strong understanding of data governance, security, access control, observability, lineage, and compliance practices. - Experience implementing data quality frameworks with reliability targets, freshness guarantees, and operational monitoring. - Experience designing secure multi-tenant data platform…